Duke Department of Political Science hosts Interdisciplinary Political Theory Retreat

Shaun King/ September 12, 2016/ Political Theory Workshop

Funded by a Humanities Futures Grant from the Franklin Humanities Institute, the Interdisciplinary Political Theory Retreat was held on September 9, 2016 in 270 Gross Hall.  Faculty from the history, philosophy and political science departments, as well as the Divinity School, the Law School, the Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Sanford School of Public Policy met to discuss goals and plan future events.  Look for upcoming events on the Franklin Humanities Institute and Political Science websites.  

Humor and Free Speech: Humor and Politics Meeting – March 31, 2015

Shaun King/ March 31, 2015/ Humor & Politics

For this theme, we discusses the 2004 mockumentary “The Confederate States of America” and Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”.  We also considered contemporary French issues surrounding free speech and humor – namely, the Charlie Hebdo shootings and the comedy of Dieudonne M’bala M’bala. We had a brief presentation from one of our undergraduate students Daniel Stublen. He shared his senior thesis research in a short talk entitled “The Limits of Humor in France: a case study of comedian Dieudonné”. Our discussion was fairly serious,

Read More

Humor and Democracy: Humor and Politics Meeting – February 24, 2015

Shaun King/ February 24, 2015/ Humor & Politics

For this session, we discussed episodes of the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation and the BBC sitcom Yes, Prime Minister, with supplemental readings from The Onion. The conversation revolved around the limitations of democratic decisions-making identified in the different pieces. While Parks and Rec and the Onion articles mock the incompetence, ignorance or intolerance of the American electorate, Yes, Minister generally ridicules the corruption of bureaucrats and the weakness of elected officials. The list of episodes for the meeting was: Parks and RecreationSeason

Read More

Humor and Totalitarianism: Humor and Politics Meeting – January 20, 2015

Shaun King/ January 20, 2015/ Humor & Politics

Our theme that month was “Humor and Totalitarianism” and we discussed the film The Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin and the short play Largo Desolato by Vaclav Havel, with short theory selections from Hannah Arendt’s On Violence and Slavoj Zizek’s For they know not what they do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. We compared Arendt’s account of jokes and laughter as undermining the authority of a totalitarian regime with Zizek’s more pessimistic view of entertainment as a way of maintaining the reigning ideology. We debated the meaning of the final speech in Chaplin’s

Read More